Agent Builder

In the AI industry, a wrapper application typically refers to an application that does not train its own foundation model but instead calls APIs from vendors such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google to build a product experience on top of them.

Microsoft's Agent Builder and Skill Builder allow non-technical users to create dedicated AI agents without any coding.

The three criteria for determining whether an agent is worth building are: consumes a large amount of time, is process-oriented or repeatable, and is highly specific to the organization.

Users can enter a natural language prompt in Copilot to create an agent; the system identifies the intent and automatically redirects to Agent Builder, pre-generating a name, description, purpose statement, and general guidelines.

Agent Builder supports adding specific documents, Teams channels, and team group chats as grounding sources for the agent.

Agent Builder can automatically identify repeatable tasks and generate a Skill that contains complete instructions, parameters, and output rendering methods.

Agent Builder supports multi-co-authoring, allowing edit permissions to be granted when sharing an agent.

Agents can be submitted for organizational review, and upon approval appear under the 'Built by your organization' category in the agent store, with quality control performed by administrators.

Agent Builder has a built-in Monitor tab where creators can view total session count, daily active usage, average user message count, average duration, engagement, and knowledge source charts without requiring administrator permissions.

Agent Builder supports scheduled runs and event triggers (such as performing actions when an email arrives), as well as Office action connections to specify output formats such as email or PowerPoint.

Copilot Studio is positioned as the advanced option for when Agent Builder cannot meet requirements.